Which Countries are the Top 5 Hackers? You May be Surprised

As I’ve mentioned before, hacking is big business. Whether to steal intellectual property, extort companies for a ransom, infecting systems to be used for spam or covert mining, or just outright stealing of cash, cybercriminals want what you’ve got.

Here at MicroData we manage many systems and I wanted to share some specs on a server we manage that readers may find interesting. The server in question hosts websites and in addition to the usual security measures we put into place on any Internet-facing server, we also install software that monitors login attempts and if too many failed attempts are made within a given time period, the IP address trying to login gets blocked. The address – and its general geographic location – also gets logged.

So over the past 30 days, here’s the Top-5 list of countries where those hack attempts originated:

China (792)

USA (766)

Brazil (480)

India (355)

Russian Federation (205)

Seeing China and Russia on the list probably doesn’t surprise anyone, but having almost as many hack attempts from within the U.S. as from China usually does cause an eyebrow to rise. And most people are surprised that Brazil and India are so active in trying to access systems. They are almost never mentioned in popular press.

There are a couple of takeaways.

First, understand that these are automated attempts. It’s not personal so don’t think about it in that way. There is no human sitting at a keyboard trying different password combinations. The defenses your organization needs to have in place must protect against continuous, 24×7 attempts to get at your systems, data, and users.

Second, you need to be extra concerned if any of your user’s credentials are on the Dark Web where they can be simply purchased. Hackers and their automated systems will endlessly try those credentials and thousands of variations. So a password change from ‘lollipop1’ to ‘lollipop2’ is almost useless – but it’s still what most users do. This is why even if hackers get an old password, they will be often successful in gaining access to a network or system.

Make sure you have a Dark Web monitoring solution in place like MicroData’s Dark Web Guardian. We now offer a small business package for organizations with up to 15 users for just $49.